


An Open Door, The Sky

by ScriveSpinster



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: Fix-It, Future Fic, Gen, Help from an unlikely source, Tigers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 15:15:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16935639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScriveSpinster/pseuds/ScriveSpinster
Summary: Names, and paths, and choices. (And the benefits of being courteous to tigers.)One possible future for the Shieldmaiden from Hojotoho!, because if there’s anyone who deserves a fix-it fic, it’s that kid.





	An Open Door, The Sky

**Author's Note:**

> Contains spoilers for Hojotoho! and the Mysteries of the Foreign Office Fate-locked content. 
> 
> Title is stolen from text on the Knight of Feasts card, because I would never have come up with one on my own.
> 
> Fallen London is © 2015 and ™ Failbetter Games Limited: www.fallenlondon.com. This is an unofficial fan work.

When the young diplomat-in-training slipped out over the walls separating the Foreign Office complex from the rest of Port Carnelian, he did it quietly, and with an urchin’s remembered skill for rooftop-walking. It wasn’t forbidden to leave the houses and offices he called home or the wealthy districts surrounding them, but it was frowned upon, and advancement was difficult enough without the clinging disapproval of his superiors.

He was here to learn, they would tell him, and not to be gadding about in the poor and dangerous areas of Port Carnelian; if he had run out of learning to occupy him, they would find him more, and if he had other needs, those too could be seen to discreetly. As for other reasons to go wandering among the masses, those were surely insignificant. He wanted to argue with that – if he was to be a diplomat, it seemed to him, then he should _know_ the cities whose dignitaries he would be treating with, and the people they spoke for, not from a distance but as they saw themselves. But it wasn’t just principle that drove him, though it might be easier if it was. In truth, there were times when he looked around at the tapestries on the walls, the rich silks and sapphires adorning everything, and he needed to be anywhere but where he was.

Sometimes he did visit the poor quarter, just to smell the smoke of the cooking fires and see the faces of the people who lived there, to walk past the houses that lined the canals, half-foreign and half-familiar and nothing at all like home. Sometimes his journeys took him elsewhere, along paths he couldn’t trace later if he tried – down to the docks, and up past coffee houses and tea shops, heavy with smoke and bright with song. Sometimes it was company he wanted. More often, it was solitude.

On that day, it was the outskirts that drew him, and his feet led him on past markets and miners’ taverns, until the jungle was close and the city’s better districts far behind. Ahead of him, an open-air courtyard rose, lined with pillars and cushioned couches, overgrown with fungus: the Assembly of Tigers, where the Governor was meant to meet with his striped subjects, to the benefit of both. That was a joke, he thought, looking about himself, and an insulting one. The place had been luxurious once, but it was in poor repair, even for an outside arena; no fires were lit in the braziers flanking the court, and the cushions smelled of mildew.

The Governor wasn’t there, but a tiger was. It lounged on a weather-stained couch between two toppled pillars, its great head resting on its forepaws, its tail curling and uncurling in a lazy rhythm. It regarded him, as he stepped into the courtyard, with neither contempt nor mercy. _You are here for as long as I choose to tolerate you,_ that half-lidded gaze seemed to say, _and after that, you are food._

The urge to be elsewhere was an itch between his shoulderblades and on the back of his neck, but something about that kind of honesty felt cleaner than the tiled fountains and birdsong of the complex, and wariness wasn’t enough to make him back away from it. So he bowed his head in respect, and – after he stepped closer, and the tiger seemed to show no offense at his presence – sat down on a moldering pillow himself.

Usually, he tried to avoid spending too much time alone with his thoughts, but with the Mountain’s light so bright and close, there seemed less to fear from dark waters; in this place, sometimes even his dreams were green and golden, and he slept the night through without screaming. So he closed his eyes and kept his hands open, breathed in and then out again, and let the heat and stillness sink into him. Sweat trickled down his back, beneath his linen shirt, and a light breeze blew westward from the Mountain. Somewhere in the fungal canopy above his head, birds were calling; there was little beauty in that song, but there didn’t need to be, when they sang only for themselves. Another breath, and peace drifted slow and sleepy across his mind. 

When he opened his eyes again, the tiger was sitting in front of him, not quite close enough to touch. It seemed larger up close, more vivid, more real. If it chose to spring, he would have no chance of escaping it – but that had been true since he had set foot in the pillared courtyard, and with the day’s heat around him, and birdsong above, panic seemed curiously distant. All would be as it would be. There were no more promises than that.

“You are fearless, young one,” the tiger growled.

“I am far from that,” he said. His sister was fearless, wherever she was now. He was afraid of the cold, and the dark, and of drowning, and he was afraid of going back to London, where he would dream of all those things again.

“Do you not think I might devour you?” it asked. He didn’t think it was a threat, but it was hard to say for certain.

“I do not think I would enjoy it if you did,” he said quietly, “but I cannot claim it would be unjust.”

The tiger let loose a low, chuffing breath. After a moment, he realized that it was laughing.

“What’s this?” it asked, in a low, amused rumble. “Have I found a diplomat that speaks truth instead of flattery? And what is your name, then, honest guest of mine?”

 _The Shieldmaiden,_ he almost said, but it had been years indeed since he had spoken those words, and he wasn’t sure he had a right to them. Then he thought of what they called him now, but that didn’t seem to fit right either. It was a Foreign Office sort of name, one for soirées and spywork, and out here, everything about it sounded false.

“I’m not certain I have one any longer,” he said.

Silence. The tiger’s tail flicked back and forth. Its eyes bored into him, lambent and inescapable.

“Then you may have mine,” it said. “Not to keep. To use, should you have need of it.”

It moved, then, without warning, pushing him to the ground with one great paw, bringing all its weight down on top of him. 

_So this is it,_ he had time to think, and there was a strange relief in that promise of ending – but instead of teeth closing on his throat, there came the quick swipe of a claw across his chest, and the heat of his own blood bright on white linen. Another cut, even as he flinched from the pain, and a third, curving in a swift arc. A symbol. A sigil. The wounds were shallow, but he was sure somehow that they would scar. Then the paw was lifted from his chest, and the tiger sat back again, blinking down at him where he lay sprawled on the weathered courtyard floor.

“You may call on me,” it said, “if you are ever lost in dreaming. _Once._ ”

“Thank you,” he said. He wasn’t sure what it was that he had been given, only that it _was_ a gift, but tigers – cats and dreams... there was something there that mattered. He raised a hand to the stinging wound on his chest, wincing; his fingers came away wet with blood – _red, so red_ – and he stared at it a moment before scrubbing it away in the fabric of his shirt. He wondered if an explanation would be required when he returned, or if they would simply accept that blood was a thing that happened, sometimes, to people like him.

“Will you show me the way out?” he asked, but the tiger was already padding away, and didn’t look back at him once.

 _Heading east,_ he thought – away from London, away from dreaming and the chill waters of the zee. It was a better sort of direction than the one that had been so lately on his mind.

He stood shakily, brushing dust from his trousers without regard for his ruined shirt. Around him, the city rose, and beyond it, the jungle. The peace that London had wrought with the Wakeful Eye only extended so far; one step too far into that wilderness, and he would be prey.

He could walk out that way anyway. There would be no one to stop him.

He swayed in place, dizzy from the thought, and from the pain of a tiger’s name carved into his skin. It was a gift, and he knew what it meant now: there were paths that led from this courtyard, and he might walk any of them – north into darkness, or east towards light, or back to the luxury at Port Carnelian’s rotten heart, or elsewhere and onward, into impossible places.

He could even, perhaps, go home.


End file.
